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Thursday, August 31, 2017

A three-month old crisis in the Gulf that has pitted Qatar
against an alliance led by the UAE and Saudi Arabia has settled into a family
squabble in which the protagonists appear to be singing different variations of
the same song.

Qatar and its detractors disagree on how they view the world
around them and how they would like to shape it, but are in tacit agreement on
the fundamental political structure of their respective states that seems
designed to put a 21st century veneer on traditional autocratic and
tribal rule.

To be sure, Qatar has couched the defense of its
controversial foreign policy and relationships with Islamic militants in the
language of a forward-looking state that embraces concepts of democracy and
press freedom. The UAE defends its approach as a pillar of the fight against
terrorism and extremism.

Yet, several interviews in which senior UAE diplomats make
no bones about their defense of autocracy and the fact that their country’s
alignment with the United States is based on interests rather than shared
values is just as applicable to Qatar, which advocates greater political
freedoms for others rather than itself.

At the core of the dispute in the Gulf are different
strategies for regime survival as Gulf autocracies are forced to diversify and
rationalize their economies and rewrite social contracts that no longer offer
citizens cradle-to-grave welfare in exchange of surrender of political rights.
The different strategies are rooted in perceptions of how to come to grips with
a post-9/11 world and a region whose fundaments were rocked by the 2011 popular
revolts.

Qatar’s embrace of the rise of political Islam and the quest
for change that exploded onto the political scene with the uprisings that
toppled four Arab leaders, constitutes, despite naively assuming that the Gulf
state itself can remain immune to transition, a direct challenge to survival
strategies adopted by the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt.

Among the four, the UAE has been the most radical and
consequential in its effort to ensure the survival of its rulers. More than any
other Gulf state, the UAE opted to discard past sensitivity to public empathy
with Islamic causes in favour of wholly aligning its counter-terrorism policies
with those of the United States, positioning itself as an indispensable
military ally, and brutally suppressing dissent.

The policy overhaul aimed to ensure US military support for
a country whose sense of security has in part been shaped by Iran’s continued
occupation of three Gulf islands, Abu Musa and the Greater and Lesser Tunbs.
Iran seized the islands in 1971, two days before the UAE achieved independence.
The policy change also constituted a response to the rejection on national
security grounds by the US Coast Guard and Congress of a 2006 bid by Dubai
Ports World to take over the management of several major American ports. “Having
a company right out of the heartland of Al Qaeda manage those ports…is
madness,” US
Representative Peter King thundered at the time.

The rise of US President Donald J. Trump with his apparent
empathy for Arab autocracy and lack of interest in the traditional US promotion
of democratic values, has emboldened UAE officials to be more forthright about
the political philosophy that informs their system of government.

”We have our own style of democracy. We have something
called the majlis system, which is open forums where people address their
leaders, where they voice their grievances and they come and they say, ‘I need
this’ or ‘This is a problem’ or ‘My son’s school isn’t working,’ and this is
the Bedouin style of democracy. Is this the Jeffersonian style of democracy?
No. But it works for us, it works for our culture, it works for our identity,” Yousef Al Otaiba, the
UAE’s influential ambassador to the United States, recently told The Atlantic
magazine.

“If you asked the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt and
Bahrain what kind of Middle East they want to see in 10 years, they would have
opposed that of Qatar," Mr Al Otaiba said in a separate television interview. Instead,
he said, Qatar’s detractors were pushing for "strong, stable and
prosperous secular governments."

Mr. Al Otaiba’s promotion of Western style-secularism
appeared in contrast to the lyrics of the UAE’s national anthem that embodies
Islam as part of the country’s identity. “You have lived for a nation whose
religion is Islam and guide is the Qur’an,” the
anthem says.

The arrest in Abu Dhabi
only days after Mr. Al Otaiba’s remarks and sentencing to a year in prison of
two Singaporeans, a man and a pre-operative transgender woman, on charges of
cross-dressing suggested that the ambassador’s notion of secularism was more
akin to public norms extolled in the anthem than any notion of secularism. The
sentences were subsequently reduced and the
two Singaporeans allowed to return home.

In yet
another interview, Omar Ghobash, the UAE ambassador to Russia, was equally
blunt in his defense of autocracy. “We do not claim to have press freedom. We
do not promote the idea of press freedom. What we talk about is responsibility
in speech.” Ghobash appeared to justify the UAE’s position on the same argument
implicit in Mr. Al-Otaiba’s statements: the country’s rulers rather than its
citizens know what is best for them. “Speech in our part of the world has a
particular context, and that context can go from peaceful to violent in no time
simply because of words that are spoken,” Mr. Ghobash said.

Messrs. Al Otaiba and Ghobash’s portrayal of the UAE’s
political philosophy seemed more in line with a decades-old news clip in a music video entitled ‘$heikh
it’ by Kuwaiti-American hip-hop group Shafiq Husayn & the Sons of Yusuf
than with a cutting-edge, 21st century state. “A man torn between two worlds. He’s an Arab
sheikh who was born in an old Arabia and will die in a new one. He worships
Allah, loves the desert, and is one of the richest men in the world. His
forefathers ruled the world from the back of a camel, he rides it in a
limousine. But he remains, as they were, the centre of tribal life. He’s the
man you serve, the man you hunt with, and the many you fight for. Above all,
he’s the man who leads,” the news reader intoned.

To be fair, the news reader’s portrayal of change in the
Gulf is equally true for Qatar, where the Gulf crisis has sparked a new wave of
nationalism that centres on support for the country’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin
Hamad Al Thani. Like his counterparts in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Tamim
is “the man who leads” and brooks no dissent. Time will tell whether that is a
political model that can withstand far-reaching economic reforms, the radical
rewriting of social contracts, and unstoppable technological advances. So far,
however, it has allowed Qatar to stand its ground in a dispute in which the
protagonists have beyond their differences much in common.

James Dorsey tells Paul Jay that Trump's plan is to force the Taliban to
negotiate, but there is no reason for them to do so

Full video at

biography

James
Dorsey is
a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of

International
Studies, and co-director of the University of Wuerzburg’s Institute for Fan
Culture and the author of The Turbulent World of

Middle
East Soccer blog, a book with the same title, Comparative

Political
Transitions between Southeast Asia and the Middle East and

North
Africa, co-authored with Dr. Teresita Cruz-Del Rosario and four forthcoming
books, Shifting Sands, Essays on Sports and Politics in

the
Middle East and North Africa as well as The Gulf Crisis: Small

States
Battle It Out, Creating Frankenstein: The Saudi Export of Ultra-conservatism
and China and the Middle East: Venturing into the

Maelstrom.

transcript

PAUL
JAY: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay. Donald

Trump
continued the circus show that is his presidency and was his

campaign
with a speech which was a rant, a tirade, an attack on just

about
everybody who says anything critical of Donald Trump. I

personally,
I have to confess, I'm enjoying every moment of this. I

think
the more dysfunctional this presidency is, the better for the

people
of the world. I would hate to see the same objectives executed

by
someone who seems to be more functional and looks certainly more presidential,
that's Mike Pence, so I'm not one of the ones that is in any

hurry
for Donald Trump to exit the scene. What do leaders around the

world
think of all this, and then particularly, what do the Chinese leaders

think
of this? Add to that Pakistan and India, because it was only the day before
this that Trump delivered a speech on what was supposedly new American strategy
in Afghanistan. There wasn't a heck of a lot new about

it,
except much more inflated rhetoric about Pakistan's role in what they called
harboring and creating safe havens for the Taliban, and maybe

even
more, bringing in, inviting India into Afghanistan as a major investor, which,
greatly inflaming the Pakistan-Indian tensions.

Now
joining us to dissect all of this is James Dorsey, who joins us from Singapore.
James is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies
and co-director of the University of Würzburg's

Institute
for Fan Culture, and he writes extensively on the Middle East and

on
Asia and on geopolitics. Thanks for joining us.

JAMES
DORSEY: My pleasure to be with you.

PAUL
JAY: It's hard to know where to start with Trump. His Afghan

speech
called for essentially upping the stakes of pressure on Pakistan

and
its support for the Taliban. There's nothing new about all this. In

fact,
Pakistan's support for the Taliban, at least in the beginning,

certainly
earlier support of Pakistan's support for Al-Qaeda's jihadist

forces
in Afghanistan, was U.S. policy. This whole thing is rooted in

Brzezinski
and Carter and the idea of sucking the Russians into

Afghanistan,
and working with jihadists and working with Afghan fundamentalists that they
want to call Islamic terrorists, this was U.S.

policy,
and Pakistan's just sort of continuing it in its own interest. But

all
that being said, this policy of Trump weighting in to bring India,

tipping
the balance to some extent on how the U.S. plays its cards in

that
region, and with the ultimate real confrontation, potentially, with

China,
which, both have serious positioning in Pakistan and tensions

with
India, how, before we get into the deeper geopolitics of this, how

do
these countries take anything the Americans do right now seriously

when
it's President Trump?

JAMES
DORSEY: Well, for starters, I think, because it's the United States

and
what the United States represents, you can't ignore it, no matter

who
is at the head, who is President of the United States. Trump adds a

layer
of difficulty to that because he's unpredictable, because he's full of

flops,
and because he, obviously, mitigates between, on the one hand, a

very
rational speech, whatever you think of the policy that he laid out on South
Asia and Afghanistan, and the kind of very emotional rant that we s

aw
in Phoenix, Arizona, merely 24 hours later.

What
that means is that on the one hand, foreign leaders have to take

Trump
into account, but in many ways, will look at ways in which they can assert
their own interests simply because the United States no longer is a reliable
partner, or if it's not a partner, it's not even a reliable force.

PAUL
JAY: Just to recap, his main plan, he's apparently not saying how

many,
increase troops, but they've already announced the new troops

are
already arriving in the next few days in Afghanistan. There's some

talk
about three, 3,900, 4,000 new U.S. troops, but if you have now set

the
bar that the United States cannot leave Afghanistan without

essentially
forcing some kind of negotiation, creating some kind of government structure
there, negotiations that the Taliban may someday

be
part of, you're essentially calling for endless war for anyone, I think,

knows
the region. That is not going to end with 4,000 troops. That was

just
to recap, I think, the main point of what Trump called for in his

Afghan
speech plus the inclusion of India. You're sitting in Beijing. The Chinese are
the other uber-power in this region. How do you take all this,

and
what are your next moves?

I
know within just a couple of hours of Trump's speech, China issued a--Foreign
Minister Yi issued a statement in support of Pakistan, and then

the
Pakistani Foreign Minister, he issued a statement talking about how they're
going to rely more on this trilateral committee, which is India, Pakistan, and
... I'm sorry, Afghanistan, Pakistan, mediated by China. I

mean,
does all this really lead to a bigger Chinese role, I guess is what

I'm
asking.

JAMES
DORSEY: Well, the bigger Chinese role is already there. China's investing more
than $50 billion into Pakistan, primarily into energy and

into
infrastructure projects. It's the single largest investment it's making

as
part of its One Belt One Road initiative, the initiative that's supposed

to
create this infrastructure linkage across the Eurasian landmass. China

already
has enormous stakes in Pakistan, and enormous interests. The problem here is
that in some ways, China's attitude is a mystery, at least

a
mystery to me. That is to say, China has supported Pakistan in its

support
for militant groups and militant leaders, or at least its selective support for
some militant leaders. It's only a few weeks ago that China vetoed, if I'm not
incorrect, for the third time in a year and a half, the designating of a
Pakistani militant by the UN Security Council as a

global
terrorist.

The
mystery about this is ... The obvious assumption is that they're

doing
this because this militant is anti-Indian, very active in disputed

Kashmir,
and therefore it needles the Indians. The mystery is that the

heart
of the Chinese investment in Pakistan is the province of

Balochistan
in western Pakistan, which borders on Iran. That's where

the
key port is, and that's where the road, from where the road-railway linkages
are supposed to go into northwestern China. And the

northwestern
Chinese end of this this is particularly important, because

that's
where the Chinese have problems with a restive Muslim

population,
Turkic Muslim population, and that they're hoping that

through
economic growth in Pakistan, economic growth will be duplicated

in
Xinjiang, northwestern Chinese province, and that's how they're going

to solve
their own problem. Now, if you're protecting militants, you're not going to
pacify an already volatile part of Pakistan that has been racked

many
targeting Chinese. The guy you're talking about, tell me his name

again.

JAMES
DORSEY: Masood Azhar.

in
India. I mean, it seems like you're having, like Trump and the people around
him seem to be more committing to this, not that it's a complete departure from
Obama, but the idea of an American-Indian bloc versus a Chinese-Pakistani,
perhaps Iranian, bloc, but why are the Chinese doing

this?
I mean, why can't China play both ... Why can't they play this game

with
Pakistan without alienating India? They seem to be poking a stick in India's
eye.

JAMES
DORSEY: Well, you've had rising tensions with India for a while,

also
along the border where there are unsettled border issues between

China
and India. But what I think you're going to see happening is that

if,
indeed, the Trump administration moves to pressure the Pakistanis

on
the issue of support for militant groups, the Pakistanis are going to

look
at China and Russia as their escape route. Frankly, what American invests into
Pakistan pales in comparison to what the Russians are

investing.
Sorry, the Chinese are investing. So aligning themselves with

China
and, on a secondary level, with Russia, makes perfect sense. I

think,
ultimately, the Pakistanis are choosing for a short-term solution,

and
that is going to backfire on them, because they do have a problem

in
terms of their support for, or selective support for militant groups.

There's
going to be a point where the Chinese and the Russians, but

primarily
the Chinese, are going to say to the Pakistanis, "Enough is

enough.
You've got to clean up your act."

PAUL
JAY: The longer-term projection of this, if in fact--I say "Trump,"

it's
Trump, but very much the professionals around Trump, the various generals, to a
large extent, of sections of the foreign policy

establishment,
who are behind this quote-unquote "new Afghan

strategy."
But if India really is to take a bigger role in Afghanistan,

which
Trump is asking them to do, in fact pressuring them to do ... In

his
speech, we'll play a clip of this, he actually says, "India, you have

such
big market in the United States, and you make so much money out

of
the American economy and such." Like, "You owe us something, and

what
you owe us is to come into Afghanistan," that I thought was kind

of
weird all into itself.

JAMES
DORSEY: I think, let's take a step back. I think you have three

basic
issues with the policy that Trump laid out. The Indians are present

in
Afghanistan, and they have very strong interests there. In fact, part

of
the Pakistani attitude and the hostility or the tensions that exist with
Afghanistan, and Pakistani support for the Taliban, has to do with the

Indians.
The Pakistanis are determined at whatever price to reduce

Indian
influence in Afghanistan, so what Trump is essentially doing is,

he's
... And it doesn't matter how many troops he puts into Afghanistan, because the
problem is not solvable militarily, if it's at all solvable, and therefore he's
going to be aggravating the situation by escalating

things
on the military front. He's going to pressure Pakistan, which is

going
to ... And he's asking India at the same time to come to America's

aid
in Afghanistan, which means that you're escalating the whole

conflict
at a moment in which you're pushing Pakistan closer to

those
who already have tensions with the Indians, namely the

Chinese.

PAUL
JAY: How dangerous is it?

JAMES
DORSEY: It's dangerous. I mean, I wouldn't go as far as

saying
we're risking nuclear conflict, although, of course, we're

dealing
with two nuclear states, but what I do think you're getting

is a
situation in which America will be sucked in further into the war

in
Afghanistan. I don't see how they're going to come out of this with

what
Trump called an honorable and satisfactory solution, although to

be
fair to him, if you look very closely at what he said, he, by

implication,
differentiated between, on the one hand, groups like the

Islamic
State and Al-Qaeda, and on the other hand, the Taliban. He

held
open the door for negotiations with the Taliban. The problem,

of
course, is, why would the Taliban enter into negotiations if the

military
conflict is not going to force them to do so? That's unlikely.

On
the other hand, you're going to get stronger Pakistani support

for
the Taliban, as if and when the United States supports or

pressures
Pakistan to diminish its relations with militant groups, the

Pakistanis
are going to move further away from the U.S., and that,

again,
is going to add to the tensions between Pakistan and India.

So
you're getting into a vicious circle of which there is no immediate

good
exit.

PAUL
JAY: What do you think's really driving U.S., Trump foreign

policy
here? I mean, if I'm in the arms industry, I'm salivating. The

volatility
in the region is, generally volatility is good if you know how

to
play it, even in the finance side. What are the real objectives here? Because
what they're talking about seems rather obvious isn't going

to
lead anywhere, at least not in the normal ... Not in the stated

objectives,
at any rate.

JAMES
DORSEY: To me, it seems, if you look at seven month, or

whatever
it is, of Trump in office, there were two major constants.

One
is, he believes in military force, and he believes that military

force
can achieve things. Two, his almost single-minded focus is

terrorism,
and he believes that the problem of militant groups can

be
resolved militarily. I don't think that's true in Afghanistan. I don't

think
that's true in Iraq, and I don't think it's true in Syria, but until

he
realizes that what ... Exclusive use of military power, rather than

the
use of military power and law enforcement that is embedded in

far
greater policies and the social, economic, and political issues,

and
those are not short-term, achievable objectives, but unless you

embed
your military efforts in the broader policy, they're going to fail.

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About Me

James M DorseyWelcome to The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer by James M. Dorsey, a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. Soccer in the Middle East and North Africa is played as much on as off the pitch. Stadiums are a symbol of the battle for political freedom; economic opportunity; ethnic, religious and national identity; and gender rights. Alongside the mosque, the stadium was until the Arab revolt erupted in late 2010 the only alternative public space for venting pent-up anger and frustration. It was the training ground in countries like Egypt and Tunisia where militant fans prepared for a day in which their organization and street battle experience would serve them in the showdown with autocratic rulers. Soccer has its own unique thrill – a high-stakes game of cat and mouse between militants and security forces and a struggle for a trophy grander than the FIFA World Cup: the future of a region. This blog explores the role of soccer at a time of transition from autocratic rule to a more open society. It also features James’s daily political comment on the region’s developments. Contact: incoherentblog@gmail.comView my complete profile